I was listening to .Net Rocks #476 and I heard multiple times that they're leaving the one man shop behind and so on and so forth and complaining how they've been left behind and its too complicated for someone to pick up.  I whole heartedly disagree on every single level.  Software isn't more complex, its more about software envy and oversimplification that's the rudimentary problem. 

A few years back I was that 3 man shop.  I, like a lot of others, would go to the microsoft conferences and watch all the gee wiz bang cool stuff and would genuinely WANT to do what I had just learned about.  Then reality set in once I'd get back at the office... More...

Previously I blogged about my experiences of social networking done right and ...well wrong.  A while back, the power of social networking got me an interview with 10TV regarding the 70/71 split in downtown Columbus and the 1.6 billion dollar project that should begin soon.  A few phone calls and an hour later, I was talking to Karina Nova about how I make my way home every evening and a good part of my interview made it on the 5pm news.  Nice hu? More...

Reading an interesting article on Wired (they've been pumping out some good stuff lately ... or is it just I'm paying more attention?) regarding the internet and its inherit "never forget" functionality.  So I sat back for a minute and pondered this idea.  What if NOTHING ever went away?  Everything you said, everything you took a picture of never would go away.  It was stuck forever on some hard drive somewhere.  That's kind of scary.

Imagine it ... "That picture" you really didn't want a future employer to see, a certain rant you posted up on a website that really wasn't justified and so forth.  Even more simply, think of how much differently you might have acted simply IF there was a camera somewhere?  Would you have done half of what you did as a kid?  Of course not, I never would have experienced the "half full" incident or the cap explosion if cameras were involved. More...

Similar to my previous post, this one will focus on nothing more than how to create an image from beginning to end and where to get the stuff to make it all happen.  For this example, I'm going to be explaining a Windows 7 image.  Why?  It's the only one I've ran across that includes a special step -- so skip that step if you plan on using other versions.  The rest will be identical.  I'll start out by explaining what I used, what I was thinking when I created them and please, take this as a guide, not gospel, you're experience may vary.  After that, I'll get into the technical details of how I planned this out and some potential pitfalls and expansions on what I've done to this point.  If you know NOTHING about how to make wim images, this will cover a LOT of it and should get you well on your way.  I do assume you know at least some basic command line things ... like how to change to another drive and such.

First, pick a good solid machine that will generally install things quickly and has a fast network card (1gb+).  My reason behind this is simple: the faster you do the install, the faster you can make the image, the faster you can be kicking the image out the door.  It might be cool to be able to install Win7 on a 1ghz PIII but if it takes you 3 days to install, its just stupid.  As always, there's a catch - you might have to load a network or other driver into an ISO and to illustrate this, I'll be using a desktop that does NOT include the driver for the winpe image which I'll get into more detail about later. More...

I've been building out a new windows 7 image and ran into the BOOTMGR is missing.  I let it sit for a night and it came to be -- there's an extra partition on win7 that vista didn't have.  Ok, makes sense because I applied the image to C:, in my case, that's partition 1 on disk 0, it should be disk 1.  Hmm, so there must be a way to do this and of course there is.  So let's jump right in. More...